Government Transparency
Nevada Policy fights to ensure government remains transparent and accountable to the citizens it was designed to serve.
Nevadans deserve a government that is both accountable and transparent to the citizens it was designed to serve. Citizens have a right to know how, exactly, their tax dollars are being spent by government.
That is why Nevada Policy works to preserve and extend transparency in government through investigative journalism, litigation and our groundbreaking transparency project TransparentNevada.com.
Nevada Policy also provides free training and information on Nevada’s Open Meetings Law and the Public Records Act, which are the two main statutory mechanisms by which citizens can demand transparency from their government.
TransparentNevada.com
Taxpayers have the right to know how, exactly, their tax dollars are being spent. That’s why Nevada Policy makes government spending information available on TransparentNevada.com — a database of all public sector compensation information for the state of Nevada. This transparency project is a groundbreaking effort to help citizens understand how local governments are spending their tax dollars. Nevada Policy also runs a sister-site, TransparentCalifornia.com
Featured Articles
Transparency Essential to Maintaining a Free Society
Keeping our leaders accountable is among the most foundational parts of our republic, and that accountability begins with ensuring that the public has access to the best information possible. That’s…
Audit of Covid Funding Likely to Uncover More Problems
State Sen. Scott Hammond made headlines last week by calling for an audit of every federal COVID relief dollar spent in the state from mid-March 2020 to mid-May…
Episode 62: Transparency is the first step to better public policy
Free to Offend Episode 62 | Guest: Shelby Fleshood, Nevada Policy Let’s face it, most public policy debates come down to one thing: How are our tax dollars actually being…
Recent News
California bureaucrats: avoiding transparency or wastefully incompetent?
Being both an environmentalist and an advocate for government transparency was doubly painful last week. It is quite common for public agencies to stall or attempt to deny public records requests, but some methods are just too bizarre to believe. Two separate California school districts – Duarte Unified School District and Hacienda La Puente Unified School District – decided that instead of providing the requested records in electronic format as requested, they would print out their entire payroll records and mail them, along with an invoice for the cost of production._x000D_ _x000D_ California’s Public Records Act makes perfectly clear in § 6253.9(a) that public records are to be provided in their original, electronic format when requested, and I stressed this in the records requests to the school districts. Yet, not only did both agencies feel comfortable defying this part of state law, they thought nothing of wasting the resources associated with mailing a massive print out without even pausing to confirm that I would pay the associated costs of production!_x000D_
Let's end the backroom deals
Government unions and public officials are needlessly keeping Nevadans in the dark.
The 2013 Nevada Legislative Session: Review & Report Card
Executive Summary After years during which baseline revenue failed to grow, state revenues were beginning to turn around ahead of the 2013 Nevada Legislative Session. Even with more than $700 million in temporary tax hikes set to expire, Nevada was projected to receive more tax revenue by FY 2015 than it received in FY 2012.
Broken Compact
Before Nevada joined the Union in 1864, the U.S. Congress explicitly promised more than two dozen times that the new state would be on an equal footing with the original states. That promise, however, was not kept. Today, as this report’s cover illustrates, only 13 percent of Nevada’s surface is available to provide the state with a tax base for the funding of services. In some counties — examples are Mineral, Nye and White Pine — the tax base is virtually nonexistent, at 4 percent or less. Behind this problem is congressional bad faith — the breaking of a commitment to new states, a commitment even older than the U.S. Constitution: that the federal government would facilitate the settling of new states by selling or giving away unappropriated land and not keeping it. Indeed, it was on the basis of this commitment that the original 13 states agreed to the Constitution.